Jump Girl Read online

  There was indeed something in our blood, but it had more to do with the fact that there had been mediums in our family for a very, very long time, which meant spirits knew us, and we knew them. It was like being born with a “members only” pass. We had tricks that others didn’t have. Grammy Brown talked about spirits to me more often than to anyone else in the family. She said, “Spirits talk to you, Sali. It’s okay.” She said it so casually that it was no different from hearing her tell me I had brown hair and blue eyes.

  I knew my relationship with spirits was special, just like I knew my sister’s relationship with plants was special. As a kid, I didn’t think about it much, but it was a distinction. While I was inside the house playing with cards to develop my psychic abilities and talking about the dead, Grammy often sent Sandy outside to listen to the land and learn the healing qualities of plants. Sandy, never very house-trained, partly was a plant. She was botanical, often covered in mud and halfway up a tree, debating whether she could make the jump down or not. All these games and stories were Grammy’s way of teaching us about the spirit world. At the time, I just thought of it as fun. If you’re the child of a musician, it’s normal for you to play an instrument at a young age. The same can be said if you’re born into a family of psychics; you learn the art of seeing and knowing, especially if you have the spark in your eye.

  They say the eyes are the doorway to the soul, and with good reason. Our eyes inherit their color, their shape—and something far deeper. There is a light in each and every one of us, a light that shines from within. That, my friends, is the light of the soul, the larger entity. If you have ever watched someone slip from life into death, you know exactly what I mean. The light leaves the eyes at the moment of death.

  In people with natural psychic ability, that light is brighter, more intense, and somehow arises from deeper within. This is something skilled psychics recognize easily. Grammy Brown saw that spark in mine and Sandy’s eyes, and she understood that we carried gifts from birth. With observation, Grammy determined how she thought our gifts would develop. Being a medicine woman and medium herself, she watched us closely and was careful not to push anything on us. Instead she made games of our learning, and because it was special to us and her, we loved it.

  Because I know my guides well, I know who has been with me since the start and who joined the show later on. I understand that some of them will not be with me forever. As a child, all I knew was that I had spirits watching over me, and that those spirits could talk to Grammy too.

  My first interaction with the spirit world took place when I was an infant. I have no memories of this; I only know the stories my grandmother and father told. My father’s mother, Eulalie, died in the state mental hospital in Concord, New Hampshire, when I was three months old. She’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Later, when my uncle died of similar symptoms, we retrieved Eulalie’s medical records and concluded that, like my uncle, she’d probably had Pick’s disease, a neurodegenerative disease with symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s.

  My parents brought me to the hospital so Eulalie could see me before she passed. She made no gesture of recognition toward my father; nor did she acknowledge her newborn grandchild. I’m told that at her funeral I cried and cried and cried, and then I suddenly looked up at the ceiling and started laughing as if someone was playing with me. I know that spirit was Eulalie because Grammy Brown was also at the funeral, and she saw her too. As the story goes, for days after the funeral I lay in my crib and laughed as if someone was playing with me. The day I stopped laughing was the day she went away. I never felt like Eulalie was my guide, but she played her part by showing Grammy Brown that I could see her.

  Grammy Brown was the biggest influence in my young life. She has always been one of my guides. She guided me in physical form when I was young, and she has continued to guide me in spirit since the day she crossed the veil. As a child I would sometimes worry in church that I was going to be in trouble when I got to heaven because I loved Grammy Brown more than I loved God.

  As I got older, Grammy’s stories began to operate like fables meant to teach you lessons, like the stories in Sunday School, only different. Grammy loved to talk about the unseen things that other people wouldn’t talk about, like hobos, magical people, and native chiefs. She loved to talk about Indians, as she was half Blackfoot herself (her mother was full blooded).

  One of her favorite stories told how an Indian chief had rescued my father when he was lost in a bog as a child. My dad had grown up on the outskirts of this bog, and, being a typical boy, he’d spent many hours exploring the secrets it had to offer. Most of the time he scouted with a neighbor boy or one of his brothers, but sometimes he went in there alone. On one of these occasions he found himself lost deep in the marshy, overgrown woods. Bogs in New Hampshire may be safer than the swamps in the south because there are no poisonous creatures or alligators, but there are bears and quicksand. My father’s stories of the bog always involved near escapes from sinking sand and swamp monsters. He always lingered on details of how best to escape quicksand, for he was a survivalist and a marine and wanted us to be prepared. I knew to evaluate nearby roots and branches; I knew that the harder you struggled, the quicker you sank. Quicksand scared the crap out of me as a kid. Even now the slightest bit of muck in a pond will have me running for the shore.

  My dad had been adventuring in the bog most of the day, and he’d gotten distracted in the way that adolescent boys do. The sun was going down, and the air was starting to get chilly. The bog’s moisture brewed a heavy fog that lay close to the ground. He wandered for about twenty minutes before he realized he had no idea where he was. The sun had set below the trees, making it hard to tell directions. The farther he walked, the more lost he realized he was. He knew that being in the bog at night was a bad idea because the air would get very cold, and there was no place to take full shelter. He also knew that trying to find your way out in the dark was a bad idea, because he had almost drowned in that bog the year before. He found a stick suitable for walking and started picking his way forward, poking the ground in front of him to avoid sinkholes. The darker it became, the closer he got to panic. He wondered if he should abandon his search for a way out and start looking for some kind of shelter.

  When he looked up from the ground he’d been carefully scanning for sinkholes, he saw an Indian chief standing in front of him. The man was old and weathered from the sun, and he wore a full headdress. My father didn’t question what the chief was doing in the bog; he assumed the chief must live there. They had a brief conversation, during which my dad was surprised to learn that the chief knew who he was and where he lived, but my dad was so relieved to see another human being—particularly one who seemed to know how to get him home—that he didn’t ask many questions.

  He fell in line behind the chief, following his footsteps through the bog with ease. The chief was so agile and knew the path so well that they avoided all the sinkholes and tangled roots. My father’s fear eased as he followed the chief and soon found himself stepping out of the bog onto the road just down from his home. Before my dad could say goodbye, his guide was gone, slipping back into the forest. He returned home long after sunset. Grammy Brown was waiting for him in the yard with a relieved look on her face. When he told her his story, she smiled and told him there were no Indians “living” in the bog.

  My father’s story often ended at that point, with the question left hanging of who the Indian was. My grandmother’s version of the story continued. She went on to tell us how her mother—Little Beaver, the daughter of a Blackfoot Indian chief—had crossed the continent from Montana through Canada to Quebec rather than allowing herself to be placed on a reservation. Along the way she met an Irish Traveller who had recently landed in Canada and become a Mountie. Little Beaver married the Irish Mountie, changed her name to Cora, and moved with him to Vermont.

  These were my great-great-grandparents, the ancestors whose blood carried the special gifts I was f
ortunate enough to receive. The gifts came both from my great-great-grandmother’s Native American blood and my great-great-grandfather’s Irish Traveller blood.

  Grammy Brown went so far in her tale telling as to suggest that the Indian chief in the bog was the spirit of the Blackfoot Indian chief who was my great-great-great-grandfather. She never told us what to think, but I agreed, for the Indian chief sometimes came to our house to visit at night. We called him “Chief Ugga-Mug-Chug” because that was the name my dad had made up for him. I don’t know what his real name was, for I have always struggled to receive names from spirits. I get obscure stories from their lives, see them in detail, and have full conversations with them, but names … not so much.

  Sandy was always fonder of Chief Ugga-Mug-Chug than I was. He scared me a bit because he always wanted us to go flying with him into the bog, which I lived in mortal fear of. But Sandy spoke in the morning of how she had left her body and flown over the town, deep into the bog.

  Most of my guides spoke to me in my dreams and through mirrors. Mirrors were easy because we had a lot of them in our house. I knew the spirits in the mirror didn’t live there. I imagined they lived on the other side of the mirror and, like me, were gazing in and through it, like looking down the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sometimes I saw them standing in the hall or in the living room next to people. But in those situations, I usually didn’t talk to them. My childhood conversations with spirits were saved for my dreams and for time spent in front of the mirror for the purpose of talking to them. I tried not to do it in front of my parents; nor did I talk to them about it. I thought of talking with spirits as something that only Grammy and Sandy understood.

  Over the years, as my relationships with my spirit guides grew stronger, I started noticing them when they spoke. When I felt a sensation of pressure inside my head, I knew that the thought I’d just had was not my own. That never scared me, because Grammy had made such things seem interesting and normal. Spirits spoke to me when I was young, usually to warn me to do or not do something or to make me pay attention to things I should remember.

  The sensation when a spirit was triggering me psychically was different from when I was picking up on something psychically myself. Sometimes when I couldn’t figure out a situation or people’s intentions, I experienced the familiar sensation of expansion in my brain and knew that someone was showing me something. As a child, I never tried to figure out who was directing me. I could feel their essence as familiar to me as my parents or my Grammy, and I listened, trusting them implicitly. I could usually tell if they were male or female. They always felt old in the sense that their souls were ancient. Sometimes I could perceive images of them, but most of the time I didn’t bother trying. I didn’t care about their names or who they were until I was a teenager, when I used a Ouija board for the first time.

  3

  Grammy Brown

  Grammy Brown lived in Whitefield for most of her life. She was known as a “wise woman,” and people came from near and far to seek her counsel, whether their issues lay with the living or the dead. She was well respected in her community, so everyone called her Gram, a title more than a name.

  When visitors arrived she promptly sent me outside, explaining that they needed to talk about private stuff. The guests may have claimed they had come to buy worms or that they had a hankering for her good cooking, but I knew why they were really there. I could see the spirits that followed them through the front door. Sometimes I would get annoyed with them for thinking they had fooled me. I wanted to say something to set them straight, but I knew Grammy wouldn’t appreciate that.

  When I asked her why I couldn’t stay and listen, she told me her guests didn’t understand how mature I was and that they saw only a child. Later, when they were gone, we sipped coffee in her kitchen while she told me some of their tales. She explained how this one had lost his wife and that one was struggling with money problems. She spoke to me like an equal, never talking down to me or simplifying things for a child’s mind.

  Sometimes instead of telling me what her guest had come for, she would ask me why I thought they were there. As I answered her, she puffed on her cigarette with sparkling eyes and a grin that said she knew an important secret. I could sense her thoughts, and I knew she was proud of me, which made me happy. When I finished, she told me I’d done well, and she reminded me that not everyone had the ability to see the spirit world or sense things that had not yet happened. By gently reminding me of these truths, she instilled in me a deep understanding of our special art.

  Most of Grammy’s teachings took place around the kitchen table. I have always thought of that table as the designated meeting place for spiritual matters in her home. It’s where we sat to play cards, drink coffee, and talk about dead people. It’s where she met with the visitors who came seeking her advice. We’d sit there and play rummy for hours. Through those games I learned how to predict when the cards would give me what I wanted and how to usher in the small changes that would shift an outcome favorably. Though my tools were normal playing cards, I was learning the rudimentary knowledge of how to read the future. I still use cards, but long ago I moved on to tarot, finding in their imagery a plethora of information. She chose this space purposefully, as she believed spiritual guidance should be both nourishing and practical. Yet her belief in spirit was all-encompassing. She didn’t require a special time or place to do sacred work because she believed every moment of life was filled with spirit.

  Grammy spoke to me often about the responsibility of helping those in need and about the healing power of comfort. She taught me that useful things also could be, and should be, magical. For instance, a kitchen table can be a powerful tool of intention, infused with the ability to put people at ease.

  Like the rest of her house, Grammy’s kitchen was a hodgepodge of sights and smells. Pipes were exposed, walls were painted different colors, and shelves were crooked. Her dishes were chipped and mismatched, and the many chairs at the table came from a variety of old sets, handed down or found somewhere. Herbs hung to dry above the wood-burning cookstove, where she often had coffee and medicine brewing at the same time.

  Someone who saw only the monetary value of a thing would say Grammy was poor, but anyone who spent a few minutes with her in her home walked away thinking differently. Grammy Brown had a richness of life, and her house had a presence all its own.

  I later learned that there is a Latin term for this presence: genius locus, spirit of place. Such an essence of being inhabits our homes, parcels of land, and all sacred places; it is felt more often than seen.

  Grammy had the ability to connect with the spirit of place wherever she went, and she taught me how to do it too. She explained the importance of recognizing the sacred in all things and of paying homage to the spirits that inhabit special places like wells, graveyards, forests, and any land that bears fruit. She reminded me that if I was kind to the beings who inhabited such places, they in turn would be kind to me. She taught me that when giving gifts to these beings, a simple gift was a good one. Often a song or a little bit of saliva was offering enough. She said, “The water that comes from your mouth holds your energy, as it comes from your body. When given in honor, it holds great power.” She also said, “You cannot sing with another’s voice.”

  I still use both of these teachings today. Anyone who has ventured with me into sacred space knows I quickly find a place to give my voice over to spirit. Words are unimportant in such songs; what is important is the feeling of opening one’s heart. Children do this naturally, often singing long nonsense tunes while vibrating in absolute happiness. This isn’t something we need to learn; it’s something we need to remember.

  As with all of Grammy Brown’s lessons, there was a practical aspect to the singing because it warned the natural world that we were about, giving animals time to scurry out of our way if they chose and alerting the spirits of nature that we were coming, should they want to see us.


  Grammy always seemed to be nursing some animal or another. She treated anything that came her way looking to be fixed, including cooney rabbits, squirrels, and birds. Animals were attracted to her, and she had an uncanny way of getting them to cooperate with her wishes.

  Once when I was quite young, Grammy called my father to tell him there was a moose wrapped up in her clothesline. He told her to stay put and he would be on his way, with me in tow. But we lived twenty minutes across town from Grammy, and the animal seemed to be in distress, so she went outside to calm the worried beast, which by then had thoroughly tangled its antlers in the clothesline. At five feet fall and 110 pounds, Grammy approached the animal, standing strong and firm. She spoke calmly, explaining to it that she had come to help and assuring it she was kindred and meant it no harm. She knew that most situations could be handled through a combination of kindness and authority; that there was a natural flow to all life and that most people and beings will follow that flow, particularly if information is given to them in a clear, concise manner. She did that with the moose. Her words and energy allowed her to set it free. By the time we arrived twenty minutes later, Grammy was sitting proudly at her table, ready to tell her tale.

  I personally have never unwrapped clothesline from the antlers of a moose, but I have used the abilities she taught me to calm other agitated animals, and twice I’ve used my voice to stop aggressive dogs. The first time I did it, I startled the dog so badly that whenever it heard my voice thereafter it would run behind the house to get out of my path.

  The lessons I learned through Grammy Brown’s guidance were vast. But like most learning in the early years of life, I saw it simply as life unfolding itself. I realized that not everyone was taught such things, but I also understood on a very deep level that this was my reality and I had chosen it.